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Archive for May 30th, 2012

In a couple of weeks I hope to celebrate my birth day. Should I treat it as a day of sorrow? You see I am coming into the wrong side of sixties. But incurable and hopeless idiot I am for a good laugh, I could celebrate it for another reason. You see I am still on the good side of seventies.
On looking back I see the moments of panic and shudder in my life and see nothing I feared did really happen. Fear of parents,teachers who breathed fire and rattled rulers and imposition are all gone. Faces of martinets and House rules are out focus. A nasty marriage divorce, and the fearful step unto the unknown are equally behind me. From where I stand clarity of life as I imagined and how it has been give me a new insight. Clarity of life as a whole, places emphases elsewhere; the reality is much more significant since I can see many chain of events that I had merely treated then as coincidence connect and a few others disappear as of no consequence.
My trust in grace of God and in the mysteries of life has been vindicated. Love as an experience I find far more important and satisfying than a life of ideas. What are sparks of ideas without the reality of life? What is love but the nature of life given the wick to burn? I hope my wife and I shall be warmed even as old age is about us.
benny

A couple of years ago I went back to India where I had lived for some fifty years. I came to know a French couple rather well. They were living well in Paris,- and both were professionals, and one day they had enough of it. Love for India had completely taken possession of them. They wanted to see, feel and live close to nature and be in ‘the centre of Cosmic forces’. Which other place but India? Their imagination was quite lively I must admit, and their transparency for all their urban living simply shone through. The man was, of all things an advocate having had his private practice and he felt India demanded all that he could give. Yes he and his wife did give, and at every corner from the law to the whole array of ‘gurus’ in their saffron clothes were for taking all they could. Having ran up all their life savings on the assumption that India of their dreams must some time and somewhere must coincide. It never did happen to their disappointment.
Recently we met once again and the Parisian wanted to know where did he go wrong. Who am I to break his illusions? The French couple loved India of their imagination while I loved the habit of being an Indian. His cultural baggage is neither Paris where he grew up but also imagination that makes reality work. Only what has changed now is this: reality of India added something new to his imagination. Paris that he is going back for good shall be all the more better.
Our cultural baggage is so heavy when consigned to imagination. In reality India weighs no more than Paris since it is to be lived in. Reality and how it is handled requires no ‘culture’ in technicolor but hard common sense.
benny